There has been known a technology of using, even in a situation where a part of information represented by a bar code cannot be decoded by a bar code reader, a character recognition technology to recognize characters adjacent to the bar code, to thereby supplement the decoding of the information represented by the bar code. For example, Patent Literature 1 discloses a bar code decoding system for supplementing the conventional bar code reading technology by using optical character recognition processing to read human readable characters that correspond to an unsuccessfully decoded code word in a bar code symbol.